Christopher Hebert - Angels of Detroit

“Okey-dokey,” she said, knowing perfectly well the legal formalities were a bluff.

Dorothy pointed to a square in the calendar. McGee would start the next night.

Never had she ridden in anything capable of moving so fast without seeming to move at all. When the elevator doors opened at the third floor, McGee thought at first that she’d forgotten to press the button and was still in the basement.

But the view had changed. Dorothy’s cage was gone. There was a tiny black woman squatting with a rag before a set of double glass doors. Beyond the doors was a suite of inner offices.

McGee was right where she’d intended to be.

But already there’d been complications. This was a forty-story office tower, and not until after Dorothy had hired her had it occurred to McGee to wonder what the odds would be that she’d be assigned the precise floor she wanted. One in forty, April had pointed out in her innocently helpful way. And sure enough, McGee had shown up tonight for her first night of work, and Dorothy had handed her a scrap of paper bearing the number twenty-four. From there she was supposed to work her way up, not down. McGee had no contingency plan, and the sight of the number twenty-four had shut off something in her brain. If she’d been capable of thinking anything, she might have thought to turn around and walk home — give up right then and there. But she’d managed to suppress her instinct to flee, and then she’d managed to suppress the unwanted information too, crumpling the number in her pocket and getting on the elevator and pressing the button for three instead.

Now here she was, her brain still numb, with a woman glaring at her, annoyed by the interruption. The woman’s ID badge said her name was Calice.

“What is it?” Calice said, already turning back to her work.

Trembling slightly, McGee picked a bottle at random from her cart. “Okey-dokey.”

“What are you doing?” Calice said as McGee approached the glass.

McGee smiled, and she was raising the spray bottle to the glass when Calice grabbed her arm. She was small but strong.

“No, no, no,” Calice said. “What are you doing?”

It was difficult to guess the woman’s age. There were no wrinkles anywhere on her face, but her hair was threaded with gray.

“This is my floor.” Calice’s teeth were big and square and clenched. She took McGee by the arm and led her over to the elevator. Calice pointed at the forty numbered lights above the elevator doors. The third bulb was lit. Calice motioned toward that one, then pointed at herself.

“You see?” she said.

Every last bit of moisture in McGee’s mouth had evaporated, but she swallowed deeply anyway. “Okey-dokey,” she said, turning around again and squirting a faint yellow mist onto the glass.

Calice’s mouth fell open. “All right,” she said, shouting with the first syllable, already calming with the second. She stopped her tongue between her big square teeth. “I don’t know what your problem is,” she said. She came right up to McGee’s chin, so close she could smell the citrus in the woman’s shampoo. “I don’t know what country you’re from that you don’t understand no . Babies understand no . Dogs understand no . Are you dumber than a dog?”

McGee didn’t know whether it was the chemicals in the air or the misery of the charade, but she suddenly felt like crying. Yellow drops were streaking down the glass.

The woman opened the glass door, and the yellow drops swerved toward the bottom.

The scene McGee overheard Calice narrating into the receptionist’s phone was not flattering, but there was nothing she could think to do to about it.

Then the numbered lights above the elevator fell—3, 2, 1, B. And then back up they came, 1, 2, 3, and McGee felt her pulse rise with each digit. The elevator doors parted, and Dorothy burst between them, unbuttoned plaid shirt flapping behind her.

Throughout the cursing and pointing that followed, McGee stood silent and dumb, offering nothing in response.

Was it minutes? It felt like hours. She didn’t know. Eventually Dorothy and Calice gave up and went away. They must have decided it was easier to retreat.

McGee waited alone in the reception area a short while longer, wobbling in her orthopedic shoes, but the women never came back.

She needed to get moving. Too much time had already slipped away. Skipping the cubicles, McGee headed straight for the corridors of private offices. As she went, she read the etched bronze nameplates on the thick oak doors. None of them belonged to Ruth Freeman. So back she went again to the beginning, but she was finding it hard to focus. The names passed under her eyes, and she forgot to read them.

Back to the beginning again, once more. Slowly, slowly this time. Concentrate. Nameplate after nameplate, but it still wasn’t there. No Ruth Freeman.

Fitch had been useless. She’d interrogated him repeatedly in the days leading up to this. But he’d been such a wreck when he’d been here before, he couldn’t remember anything about the layout. They might as well have blindfolded him.

McGee wilted backward into the spongy wall of the nearest cubicle. Was it possible Fitch had given her the wrong floor number?

On her way back to reception, to the cleaning cart she’d left behind, McGee passed a poorly lit corridor in a corner far removed from the other offices. In a glance, it looked unused, if not forgotten, space set aside for some unknown future. Most of the doors along the darkened corridor were unlabeled. Only a few of the rooms had windows overlooking the hall. Peering inside as she went, McGee saw conference rooms, long tables circled with chairs.

She was moving quickly, not watching where she was going, and as she turned a corner, she slammed her shin at full stride into the metal leg of a desk. The pain was so exquisite, she couldn’t even cry out, her breath stuffed in her mouth like cotton. She crumpled to the floor, holding her leg, biting her lip until she tasted blood.

She stayed there several minutes, squeezing her knee to her chest. When the pain finally subsided enough that she was able to lift her pant leg, she found a scarlet welt along the ridge of her shin. What kind of place was this for a desk, anyway — this dim, narrow hallway? Had it been left there to be thrown away? And would she be the one responsible for getting rid of it? But no, the computer on top was hooked up and plugged in, as was the phone. There was a pile of papers in a metal tray. A rubber stamp lay on its side in the center of the desk. McGee picked up the stamp and held it before her eyes. The letters were a backward-slanting cursive. Ink had rendered them almost indistinguishable from the background. McGee pressed the stamp into the pad and untucked her shirt. On her belly, she tattooed herself with Ruth Freeman’s signature.

Of course. Of all the offices, this one, tucked away in the shadows, was by far the most villainous.

She left the desk limping, but she’d already forgotten the pain in her shin.

McGee’s training had consisted of an hour spent sitting in front of a TV/VCR combo in the basement. On a tape drained almost entirely of color, a pair of actors in extravagant perms had demonstrated the art of dusting and vacuuming and mopping (coil the head before pressing!), and when it was over, Dorothy had turned the lights back on and handed McGee a flip chart full of colorful pictures and a schedule of which things she was supposed to clean on which night: light switches, light fixtures, keyboards, computer screens, telephones, windows, floors and carpets, door handles, door frames, windowsills, blinds.

McGee made her way back toward Ruth Freeman’s office, in what she hoped would appear to the guards watching on the security cameras as a natural progression, touching her cloth to everything in sight but never stopping.